Hyakki Yagyou

Chapter Fourteen: Rooftop, Consolation

“Light thinks it travels faster than anything but it is wrong. No matter how fast light travels, it finds the darkness has always got there first, and is waiting for it.” 

-        Terry Pratchett

December 18th, 11:30 am

The stench was horrible.

By the time the police arrived at the crime scene, Mr and Mrs Tokashiki were outside. Not outside the apartment but outside the building. He could not bear being anywhere close to that horrible place and she felt that her lungs had taken in too much of that smell, a mixture of blood, sweat, tears and urine.

The scene kept playing in front of her eyes and whenever she closed them, she would see their faces. It was a scene that Mrs Tokashiki would never forget. A scene that would eventually drive her mad and force her husband to send her to an institution.

It took the police a bit over half an hour to get there. Once they arrived, two of the officers came to question the eye witnesses whereas the rest of them went upstairs to see what had happened. They were informed of two dead bodies in an apartment on the fourth floor. There was no danger. Had they been murdered, the perpetrator had long disappeared. So, there was nothing to worry about.

The forensics would be there quickly. They should just make sure, once more, that the scene is clear and that was it. There was nothing that shocking, to people of their call, about two dead bodies. It could have been a lover’s suicide. On their way to the address, a couple of them were discussing this possibility.

It wasn’t unusual.

When they entered the apartment, it took them a long moment to get used to the horrid scent. What was that? One of the officers surnamed Ozawa said that it was almost like sulphur.

“How do you know?”

“I paid attention on chemistry classes in high school.” He responded.

No one responded to that, however, because when all of them entered the living room where the bodies were silence overwhelmed the room. The four officers glared at the man and the woman, unmoving, breathless and their faces showing at least half of the horror that the victim’s faces showed.

The bodies that had already started to decompose but this was not the most shocking thing about the scene.

The woman lied on the floor, on her back, staring at the ceiling. Her body had been thrown over the table, made of wood and glass; the glass had broken under the impact and the smithereens were scattered all across the living room floor. As she lay in the pool of shards and blood, the woman looked as if she was staring at something on the ceiling. Although there was blood all over her, she did not seem to have any stab wounds. 

The man was sitting on the floor next to her, leaned back against the couch and facing the officers. Had his jaw not been gaping so wide that it was almost torn off his head, they would have thought he was still alive. But, alas, he was not! His eyes too wide open showed terror that none of the officers could ever imagine.

The most grotesque part of the whole image was that the man was holding the knife. His hands were still clutching the cold blade as if this was his only way out from a deadly situation. His last resort. The hands were holding onto the knife so hard that it was still cutting into his skin, making it bleed. And he was the one whose chest and stomach showed stab wounds.

For Ozawa, the most bizarre was not the scene but the look in the man’s eyes. When he approached the woman to see if there was anything to spot there he noticed that her eyes had the same glow in them. It was as if they were both still alive, somewhere inside of these bodies, showing the horror of the scene that took place. Pleading them for help.